Refinements of behavioural abstractions for the supervisory control of hybrid systems

Abstract

A common approach to controller synthesis for hybrid systems is to first establish a discrete-event abstraction and then to use methods from supervisory control theory to synthesise a controller. In this paper, we consider behavioural abstractions of hybrid systems with a prescribed discrete-event input/output interface. We discuss a family of abstractions based on so called experiments which consist of samples from the external behaviour of the hybrid system. The special feature of our setting is that the accuracy of the abstraction can be carefully adapted to suit the particular control problem at hand. Technically, this is implemented as an iteration in which we alternate trial control synthesis with abstraction refinement. While localising refinement to where it is intuitively needed, we can still formally establish that the overall iteration will solve the control problem, provided that an abstraction-based solution exists at all.